Hillcrest student wins twice in Space Shuttle flight contest

Published December 17, 2010
at 11:12 pm

Hillcrest students’ science project won’t be the only sign of the Huskies aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour at its rescheduled April 1 launch.

Hillcrest students in late November learned their science project was among 16 nationwide selected to fly aboard Endeavour as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. In the days to follow, Hillcrest art students were invited to design a logo a patch-size, 4 inches by 4 inches to accompany the science project on Endeavour.

Faculty selected a winner from 104 emblems submitted. The winning designer: Keltson Howell.

The name might sound familiar. The 11^th-grader is part of the team of students whose science project was selected to fly on Endeavour. Faculty voting for the winning emblem didn’t know he was the designer, as names were left off the entries.

Howell’s clean and simple design incorporates several elements: the school’s name and color, green; SSEP; Canyons School District; Utah; Endeavor and the launch year; and a frog to symbolize the science project, which will examine the effects of microgravity on frog embryos.

Four other designs were named finalists. They were created by: Megan Bailey, 12th grade; Jacquelyn Nguyen, 11th grade; Angela Limb, 10th grade; and Ryan Baker and Colton Allred, 11^th grade.

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is a national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that provides fifth- through 12^th-graders the ability to propose experiments to fly in low Earth orbit. The SSEP was launched in June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, a project of the non-profit Tides Center, in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC. The student experiment flight opportunity is enabled through NanoRacks, which is working in partnership with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.